Harvard Radical

By James Traub

Published: August 24, 2003

Correction Appended

It is no easy or enviable thing to take over an institution that perceives itself as matchless. And this is all the more true when, as is the case with Harvard University, a great many people, including some of the most powerful people on earth, share that view. Neil Rudenstine, who was Harvard's president from 1991 to 2001, had something like a nervous breakdown a few years into the job. He recovered, and the success of the remainder of his tenure was guaranteed by a combination of courtliness and an almost hyperbolic humility in the face of his own faculty. ''He would thank you for absolutely anything'' is how one university administrator I spoke with put it. By the time Rudenstine announced his intention to retire, the university's governing board, the Harvard Corporation, concluded that the institution had grown complacent, though of course it remained matchless. And so in March 2001, the board replaced Rudenstine with Lawrence H. Summers, a secretary of the treasury during the Clinton administration and a man more inclined to flatten than to flatter a colleague's vanity. ''We didn't think we were hiring Dag Hammerskjold,'' D. Ronald Daniel, a member of the corporation, conceded.

Summers, 48, says he has always believed that the best way to show your respect for your fellow man is to argue with him, generally until one or the other of you is forced to admit the error of your ways. And so over the last two years, he has patiently explained to his colleagues in the professional schools and on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; to students, alumni and donors; and, via the print media, to the nation's elite, with footnotes and caveats and an intellectual bravura that few can deny, or possibly withstand, exactly how and why it is that the time has come for a transformation at Harvard.

Summers wants Harvard to regard itself as a single sovereign entity rather than as an archipelago of loosely affiliated institutions. He wants to change the undergraduate curriculum so that students focus less on ''ways of knowing'' and more on actual knowledge. He wants to raise quantitative kinds of knowledge to something like parity with traditionally humanistic kinds of knowledge. He wants to make the university more directly engaged with problems in education and public health, and he wants the professions that deal with those problems to achieve the same status as the more lordly ones of law, business and medicine. And he wants to assert certain traditional verities, or rather open an intellectual space in which such verities can at least be posited. ''The idea that we should be open to all ideas,'' he said when I saw him in mid-July, ''is very different from the supposition that all ideas are equally valid.''

Summers insists that he does not aspire to the role of public sage that presidents of Ivy League universities occupied until about 50 years ago. But it is simply a fact that by virtue of occupying the most commanding heights of the culture, Harvard has traditionally exercised enormous influence. If undergrad inorganic chemistry is now going to be taken to be as much a staple as political philosophy at Harvard, then your children may be more scientifically literate (and less philosophically literate) than you are.

Even if Summers were a guileful and calculating figure with a hidden agenda of drastic change, he would have a tough row to hoe. But he's not: he's a blunt and overbearing figure with an overt agenda of drastic change. It should come as no surprise that Larry Summers is not quite as popular a figure as his gracious predecessor was. One of Summers's oldest friends on the faculty said to me: ''There are a lot of people on other parts of the campus I've met who just despise him. The level of the intensity of their dislike for him is just shocking.''

I met professors who so thoroughly loathe the new president that they refuse even to grant his intelligence, perhaps because doing so would confer upon him a virtue treasured at Harvard. Despite the protections of tenure, virtually all of Summers's critics were too afraid of him to be willing to be quoted by name. It's not easy to imagine Summers winning these people over. Of course, he may not have to. Harvard's greatest presidents have been an exceptionally cold and nasty lot. One of them, Charles W. Eliot, once said that the most important attribute of a college president is the capacity to inflict pain.

As a very young Harvard economics professor, Summers was the kind of teacher who would hang around after class and talk to his students forever, and it's obvious that he still genuinely enjoys mixing it up with the kids, who tend to be an awful lot more forthright than the average tenured professor. One evening last spring, I sat in the junior common room at Dunster House, a Harvard dorm, while Summers chatted with 60 or so undergraduates. The president was wearing a rust-colored sweater whose fit was a good deal more snug than a man of his considerable bulk would normally consider flattering: many a late-night pizza had gone to forming that waistline. A student named Brad, a senior economics major, raised his hand and asked Summers if he considered it fair that certain feminist killjoys had demolished the nine-foot-high Snow Penis, which anonymous sculptors -- members of the crew team, it turned out -- had reared in Harvard Yard.

Correction: September 7, 2003, Sunday An article on Aug. 24 about Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, misstated the frequency of the John Bates Clark Medal, which is awarded to economists under 40. It is given every two years, not annually. The article also described Allston, Mass., incorrectly. It is a section of Boston, not a separate town.